I’ve got an article and a grant application to write—and something more important to do—so there’ll be nothing new here for the best part of a week. In the meantime here’s a Zen window in Cambridge:
Cardinal declares, “The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true”, says, “It astonishes and worries me that so many people believe these lies”.
Scientist comments, “It amuses and disappoints me that the cardinal is talking about The Da Vinci Code.”
This could be the start of a new series: “Strange Windows In Cambridge”. Trust me: I have more photos at least as weird as this one. This city has the best university and the worst football team(s) (per capita income) in the country and the highest density of eccentrics on the whole planet. What other place could give birth to the first psych folkie? Where else could you walk down an ordinary residential street and feel the beady (literally) eyes of tens of woollen creatures following your progress?
Where better to pick up a Crystal Skull?
Via the redoubtable Tim Worstall (who graduated to the ‘Blogroll here yesterday—like he needs the hits), I discover that there’s a British cricket ‘Blog called The Corridor Of Uncertainty. I like that it has a “Cricket” subject category, presumably to mark out the posts about cricket.
“Good Scottish Pop / Bad Scottish Pop” has it about right, pointing up the unrecognized greatness of Del Amitri and the inexplicably ignored uselessness of Belle and Sebastian. Despite some dithering about the exact status of Simple Minds, only one artiste makes into both the Good and Bad categories: Laird Rodney of the Clan Stewart.
My favourite recent headline, “Rod Stewart To Marry Model“, is one to file alongside “Pope Goes Into Hospital”.
[Oh God, Wet Wet Wet have reformed.]
By way of shaming His Comatose Stoatness I give you PooterGeek’s very own Dead Socialist Watch.
First the BBC turns against you, then Ted Kennedy snubs you:
Kennedy spokeswoman Melissa Wagoner said: “Senator Kennedy has decided to decline to meet with Gerry Adams, given the IRA’s ongoing criminal activity and contempt for the rule of law.”
She said the events surrounding the death of Mr McCartney underscored the need for IRA violence and criminality to stop and for Sinn Fein to co-operate with police.
Meanwhile, Sinn Fein’s most high profile supporter in Congress, New York Republican Senator Peter King, called on the IRA to disband.
Mr King said the IRA had made a series of poor decisions that had sparked anger in Irish-American circles and was now standing in the way of a power sharing deal between Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists.
He added that Americans were finding it “hard to see what the justification is for the continued existence of the IRA”.
Anyone would think Adams was a mafioso or something.
In the year 2000 a mysterious stranger journeyed from the future to tell us about his past. His name was John Titor and this is his story.
(Despite his supposed online notoriety, it wasn’t until now that I had even heard of him.)
I suspect the age distribution of the visitors here is such that somebody reading this must have some tips on getting parents over sixty with potentially life-threatening conditions to look after themselves properly. All suggestions welcome.
Somebody somewhere (Japan) thinks that dressing up dogs as sheep and even putting them in little pens is a good thing. Can you believe that they’ve sold out of some of these products? There’s probably a Japanese game show where they dress lambs up as dogs and get them to guide the pooches into their fleecy baskets.
If you’ve got Macromedia Flash installed on your computer this video is deeply entertaining [via The Motley Fool].
Someone was brought here yesterday by a search for “Get your Colonial Shame off my breasts”. What they really wanted was this [safe for work]. Other recent PooterGeek hits:
Yes, the last one was from the UK.
I’ve just come back from a nice dinner at the Anonymous Economist’s and have posted twice about genetics after I’ve been drinking. I can’t hold my drink—so both my most recent submissions are subject to editing in the cold light of day.
‘Night, Europe. Hello, America.
Scientists are almost as susceptible to a certain type of urban myth as the rest of the population. One popular one was that there are 100 000 genes in the human genome. When the first estimates of “the number of genes”—I use quotes because exactly what constitutes a single gene is subtle, complex, and controversial—based on large-scale sequencing came in, lots of people who should have known better were terribly shocked at how small these newly informed guesses were: “What? Only ten thousand more than a fruit fly?!” It’s only by chasing the suspiciously round 100K to its source that you see what really happened. A crude, but sensible, estimate made by a necessarily primitive method was propagated through the literature without most of the people who propagated it bothering to check its origin. In other words: “A friend of a friend told me there were 100 000 genes in the human genome”. Eventually everybody accepted it because they had been taught it as an undergraduate (or even earlier).
There is a similarly widespread, but slowly crumbling, misperception that the machinery that copies your genes tracks along your DNA like a train on rails. A better analogy would be fixed tape head reading a tape as it spools by. (If you’re interested you can read this, one of the first articles I ever put on the Web.)
One scientific urban myth that I actually found myself quibbling with a Nobel prizewinner* about is the old “we have ninety-whatever percent of our DNA in common with gorillas/chimpanzees/monkeys” factoid—often used (not by him) as a reason why we should be much nicer to primates. We should be nicer to our biological cousins, but not because of bad and meaningless statistics about our supposedly shared genetic data. My friend Patrick (a former medic) likes to counter this one by saying that the sentences “Your husband is dead” and “Your husband is not dead” are over eighty percent identical. The contention is also wrong on other levels. I’m going to offer a few simplified ones.
Firstly, most of your DNA is “junk”, at least in the sense that it doesn’t lead to a classical gene product: a protein that makes up your body. (I should point out that there are lots of other ways a message in DNA can express itself.) Secondly, even the messages that are read contain stretches that are very tolerant of randomness—to the extent that many scientists have argued that most mutation in DNA is not selected for in the strict Darwinian sense at all, that is they consider most persistent genetic changes to be accidental ones. (Almost all of these scientists still believe in evolution, however.) Thirdly, the size of a difference in DNA that matters to the full development of a living thing can vary over a mind-boggling range. The difference between death and life can be a single character in an entire book of genetic information. Even more shocking, it is possible to create artificial so-called “knockout” mice missing one or more entire functional genes that get by just fine with these whole chapters ripped out of the books of their lives.
Insofar as I have a specialism it is protein bioinformatics. I am interested in the meanings of the messages from the genome that get out to do conspicuously useful work in living things. This recent paper suggests that, if we restrict the comparison between humans and chimpanzees to these signals alone, and if we frame our comparison in other, perfectly reasonable terms, even a casual observer of the data can reach a complete different conclusion about our relatedness to chimps—our closest relatives—than the ninety-something percent shared DNA story suggests.
Right now I’m working on something with a collaborator in Germany who downloaded one of my programs. Like most of the stuff I write it’s very simple. I’ve got a passable sort-of-biology degree and a better sort-of-physics degree, but I’ve never been the world’s greatest mathematician or computer scientist. Being a determined plodder has its advantages, though, as he pointed out to me in an email, mine was the first implementation of a classic method for analysing some simple properties of protein structures that he had ever understood. Why? Because I didn’t understand any of the existing ones enough to trust them for my purposes and most of them were derived from a couple of (or perhaps just one) early programs. So I built my own version from first principles. In doing so I reminded myself why very few people bother to do these kinds of jobs properly: because it’s bloody hard work. To make matters worse, it didn’t turn out to be useful for the question that I wanted to answer so I just put my creation out there for other people to use—though not without some arm-twisting from my boss.
Of course, I didn’t actually think anyone would use it so he’s just created a whole new pile of work for me 🙂 …
*[He used this in the context of a two-handed popular talk and might have done so at the suggestion of his co-presenter.]
The UK government has rejected the proposal by Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality that, in the hope of tackling consistent academic underachievement by that group, black male pupils be taught separately for some subjects. The Department for Education and Skills says it would have “negative effects”.
Today a spokesperson from the ministry will call a special press conference to reassure worried middle-class parents that the policy of teaching children in separate state schools according to the size of their parents’ mortgages will continue.
The ever-temperate front page of The Independent screams, “IS LEBANON WALKING INTO ANOTHER NIGHTMARE?” Without a copy to hand, I think you can imagine the name and the roseate visage that make up the byline beneath the headline. Because the Indie charges for access to the online version of its output I can only quote the opening paragraph of the article that follows:
Lebanon confronts a nightmare today. As the Syrian army begins its withdrawal from the country this morning, after mounting pressure from President George Bush – whose anger at the Syrians has been provoked by the insurgency against American troops in Iraq – there are growing signs that the Syrian retreat is reopening the sectarian divisions of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war.
This is illustrated with a picture of young, beige, male protestors screaming at the camera. One has a bare chest, a studded leather strap around his wrist. He is acting up with a knife. For the rest of today at least you can see the photo here. Its implication: these people are Savages, who will be lost to Chaos without the Firm Hand of their uniformed Ba’athist overseers.
I might not be able to share with you Robert’s latest, but I can, by the magic of PooterGeek’s Future News feature, bring you the entire text of a yet-to-be-published masterpiece from the prizewinning journalist:
McDonalds and Wal-Mart now stretch from Gulf to Mediterranean. The American Empire smothers the history and pride of an entire region under a film of “democracy”. One country, however, still holds firm. There is no Starbucks in Fiskistan. Only the UN staff flown in to counsel victims at special rape crisis centres own 4x4s—and those centres would not be needed if a decade of American-sponsored sanctions had not driven the men of Fiskistan to sexually assault the largely Kurdish servant population. Here the cinemas show no Jerry Bruckheimer “actioners”; only the plaintive traditional sound of the Fiskistani nose whistle echoes out across night vistas of the rocky desert.
Fiskistan is the forgotten front in the so-called War on Terror. For a few months in the 1950s, members of the First Ambridge Battalion of the Queen’s Infantry seized this tiny country—then divided into a patchwork of statelets dominated by rival warlords—in order to secure a supply line during the Suez campaign. For that short time guerrilla fighters led by Muarbad Fiski made life for the reluctant colonial rulers hell, as they were forced to butcher young Englishmen fresh from the Home Counties to protect their nomadic existence from foreign interference.
Yesterday, American troops, closely followed (as we have come to expect) by British forces, showed that they have learned little since that folly, as they marched back into the country whence they were driven just over half-a-century ago. The assault by the so-called Coalition on the borders of this miniscule territory raged for over seventeen minutes before Lt Col Ronald Fothersgill made his historic mobile phone call to Queen Elizabeth herself, informing her that Upper Fiskia was once again under British military control.
Deeper in Fiskistan than even the most advanced of the “Coalition” soldiers, I spend the day at The Re-Education Facility of the Glorious Leader where guards and guarded shudder at the thought of the invasion. Outside the barbed wire fence set up to protect the site from the advancing US Marines, smiling Fiskistani children play. The human skull they are kicking around in a makeshift football game keeps getting lodged in the craters left by American depleted uranium cluster bomblets, their already-deadly payload laced with MMR vaccine and Sudan-1.
Asif is one of the administrators. He lives in constant dread of the arrival of the Americans. I ask him about his fears. His reply speaks for many. He pauses in his work and stubs out his cigarette on the forehead of one of the residents of the camp, seated in a rather substantial chair beside him. He politely wipes his hands clean on a beautiful traditionally embroidered Fiskistani handkerchief before shaking my hand and addressing me:
“My father was a jailer. His father was a jailer. These electrodes were handed down to me through the generations, just like our presidency. (May his Glorious Countenance Shine Upon The Fatherland Until Eternity.) They were first used by my grandfather on the balls of the last openly elected leader of the opposition. I hold history in my hands. When these Yankee dogs come here with their human pyramids, and their pointy black hoods, and their digital cameras, all of this heritage will be wiped out—just as the Jews have wiped out Palestine. They know nothing of our ways. Who will keep order when there are twenty different brands of toothbrush on the shelves? Who will pull the teeth that they brush? Eh? I spit in their decaff latte!”
His sadness is palpable. Whatever happens next it will be the end of an
earera.As I leave the facility, a group of uniformed staff approach along the path to the main gate, almost ready to begin their shift. I greet them with a friendly nod. They respond with a shouted question:
“English?!”
I tell them that I am a journalist for The Independent. In a moment they are upon me. One pulls a pistol out of his holster and beats me about the head with its butt:
“Unfunny bastard Miles Kington! Robbie Williams! Kilroy! Celine Dion! Die Pigdog!The others are kicking me with their boots, punching me with their bare hands, only pausing to roll up the khaki sleeves of their fatigues. I know I am paying for all of our crimes, for every step in our crusade to bring “freedom” to peoples of whom we know little more than the sorry tales of our previous doomed expeditions to plunder their lands. I welcome the blows. I want them to beat me with their swarthy, manly, Arab forearms until my blood washes away the crimes of the Bushes and the Blairs. Spank me, Ahmed! Spank me for my sins! I want to feel your brown cosh…
[At this point, unfortunately, Nurse Wilson had to remove Robert’s hands from his laptop.]
“Israel, not entirely evil,” says French socialist (responding with friendly politeness as I address him in an English accent on the streets of Paris):
When London Mayor Ken Livingstone wrote a poison-penned tirade against Israel and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Friday’s edition of the British Guardian, it made headlines in Britain, Israel and beyond.
But when Former French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, the No. 2 in the opposition Socialist Party and a longtime staunch Palestinian advocate, wrote a praiseworthy article of Israel last week in the left-wing, traditionally pro-Palestinian weekly Le Nouvelle Observateur, few took notice.
…
Fabius, a long time central figure of the French Left, penned an article in late February entitled “I am pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli.”
[Thanks to Judith.]
I had some superb birthday presents this year. I’d especially like to thank Judith for Keane’s Hopes And Fears, Leasey for Ultraviolet, and the Anonymous Economist for the Pierre Marcolini chocolates.
Despite the cliché title, Hopes And Fears is a real delight. It’s indie rock descended from the Radiohead-Coldplay line, but without the guitars. She Has No Time in particular is beautiful.
Ultraviolet is the best British science fiction series broadcast in the history of television. It is stylish, clever, funny, and scary. It also looks amazingly good: it’s well lit and shot on film. If you haven’t seen it or heard of it then it’s important that you read nothing more about it. [This is why I provide no link.] You are one of the fortunate ones. Buy it on DVD as soon as you can. Tell no one. As soon as you have your copy, play the first disc without reading any of the packaging and let its mystery unfold. If, by the time you’ve finished watching the series, you think it’s rubbish I’ll refund your money.
Pierre Marcolini is supposedly one of only four true chocolatiers on the planet. This is because it owns its own plantation. It may well own its own slaves as well. I don’t want to know, because I would have to stop eating their chocolate. It’s the best I have ever tasted—and I’ve eaten a lot of chocolate.
I’d also like to thank the people who bought me foodstuffs that I like, but chose the Fair Trade, organic variety especially to wind me up.
In today’s Observer [via Hak]:
On Tuesday the BBC launches the return of Doctor Who after an absence of nine years. The first episode of the new series, by Russell T Davies, writer of Queer as Folk and Doctor Who’s new creative director, will be screened at the end of this month… …this time the Doctor is to be Christopher Eccleston, an actor still best remembered for his role in Our Friends in the North. His assistant, Rose, is played by Billie Piper.
What the new series resolutely avoids is irony. ‘If we had tried to be ironic we would have died a death,’ says Davies, who is deeply in love with his baby, and thinks it as good a programme as the BBC could possibly have produced. ‘It is made for 2005. We have learnt the lessons of modern fantasy drama. This series is all set on planet Earth in the present day. We wanted to stay away from doing three moons and a man in a cape until we had learnt what we were doing.
Fine, but if the new Doctor Who is so modern and realistic, how do the Daleks – whose devilish plans could always be stymied by a flight of stairs – fit in? He cackles. ‘Our daleks fly like bastards. That’s all I’ll say.’
[The Doctor and his assistant Rosie are slumped on the sofa sharing a spliff in front of a DVD of the remake of The Magic Roundabout. The living room door bursts open in an explosion of wood and plaster. Three wheeled robots enter through a cloud of smoke.]
Dr Who: Fook me! Daleks!
Rosie: It’d just got to the good bit en’ all.
Dalek 1: WASTE THE SQUEAKY ONE.
[Dalek 2 shoots Rosie and she is reduced to a charred carcass next to the Doctor. Millions of viewers cheer.]
Dr Who: In’t yer supposed to capture us and put us in a cell secured only by a force-field, leaving me with my sonic screwdriver so I can apply it to the service panel and escape into the many corridors of your secret base?
Dalek 1: DO I LOOK STUPID? NOW WHERE’S THE DOCTOR?
Dr Who: Who?
Dalek 2: TALL, FOPPISH, UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS, PROBABLY DRESSED IN A TWEEDY LONGCOAT OR CRICKET SWEATER. MAYBE A SCARF AND A STUPID HAT
Dr Who: Ee. I doon’t know what yer talking aboot. I’m joost a simple Northern lad, watchin’ t’telly, like.
Dalek 1: FAIR ENOUGH. DO HIM TOO.
[Dalek 2 shoots Doctor Who. He dies. The Daleks pocket his stash and fly out into the cobbled street to the bangin’ accompaniment of the remixed theme tune.]
Despite years of renting I have never encountered one of those “NO DOGS, NO BLACKS, NO IRISH” signs that used to pock the British landscape. Everyone who knows me will, however, have heard my Mrs Turpey story. They can skip everything up to the last paragraph.
I was working for the university in Oxford in 1995 and about to become a graduate student in London. Imperial had a list of landlords and landladies who offered reasonable rents and conditions in return for quiet, harmless geek tenants. One of the landladies was Mrs Turpey. She had a place in Battersea that looked pretty good on paper so I rang her and arranged an appointment to look it over. She ended the phone call in a slightly lowered voice: “I have to warn you about something before you come…”
“Oh, yes?”
“…There’s a lot of those coloured people around here.”
“Really?”
I decided to go along anyway, just for fun.
She was shameless, an escaped Monty Python character. You have to remember that I had dreadlocks at this stage in my life, swinging around in front of my eyebrows in a way that seems impossible to believe now. As she showed me around the (nice) kitchen she looked at me sternly: “I hope you won’t be cooking any of those curries.”
She came to mind just now as I was casually browsing the window of a local rental agency and saw a rather nice one-bed place going for a very reasonable monthly rent. At the top of the ad was the legend “WOMEN ONLY”. At least Mrs Turpey had no prejudice against my money.
I’ve just heard a radio ad for the annual national Comic Relief campaign. (For one day every year Brits get themselves sponsored to do silly things for charity.) The radio spot featured thanks and testimony from a previous beneficiary of the fund: Yousef, a gay asylum seeker who sought refuge in Britain because homosexuality is illegal in his country of origin.
Right now a hack from the Daily Mail is in Yousef’s backyard wrestling with a local newspaper journo over the contents of Yousef’s wheelie bin.
Scientific American writes about EpiSims, a program that simulates the spread of an infectious disease throughout a population, taking into account the social interactions of the people within it. [via Slashdot]
This is a good time to point out that I conflated a couple of different issues when I rambled about the spread of HIV in the comments here. The range of cell types that a virus can infect, the ease with which a virus can cross from one individual to another, and the damage that a virus causes when it infects (at the cellular and gross levels) are all conceptually different attributes of an infection; but, to make things more complicated, they are deeply intertwined. The important thing to remember, though, is that virulence—the disease-causing power of a pathogen—and infectiousness—the ease with which it spreads—should at least be kept separate in your mind when you try to predict the behaviour of a bug.
[When I found out that the NIH had put the epidemiology chapter of Medical Microbiology online for free I was going to point you at this diagram, but a quick glance was enough for me to realise that it’s worse than useless.]
The Genome Campus library subscribes to several publications that I have to force myself only to skim read. If I don’t there’s a good chance I’ll throw them across its outer reading room and stamp on them and Joan the Head Librarian will have to report me to Security again.
One, obviously, is The Independent, whose fall from its promising start in the 80s has run neatly alongside my own erratically descending path in scientific research. Another is The Times Higher Educational Supplement. Every week you are guaranteed at least one article from some no-mark at the University of Provincial Complacency griping gracelessly about a terrible new burden imposed on him by the government. The bastards will have affronted him by suggesting that he show minimal competence in teaching or publish something original or perhaps fill out a form once a year.
There’ll also usually be a slightly better written, but no less other-worldly, contribution from an ancient university git. (Apply the “ancient” as you will.) This will warn that Oxbridge is sinking into the mire because the government doesn’t understand the old universities’ unique greatness—greatness which inevitably requires subsidy above that doled out to other educational institutions not charged with populating the Houses of Parliament. In the traditional Oxford media don style it will be a doily of unsupported assertions—usually the sort of superficially plausible nonsense that the author would cut up if one of his students stitched it into an essay.
I mention the THES because I want to bitchslap Tom Devine, pictured smiling at us from its back cover last week. This photograph of his face illustrates a report about Aberdeen University’s Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies winning a grant for 1.25m quid. We might say that it had “won the grant”; the press release prefers “successfully secured the financial award”. As the centre’s director, Prof Devine is perched somewhere between the two extremes of the UK academic landscape I referred to. For all I know, he might be a damned fine scholar in Irish or Scottish studies, but he doesn’t seem to be keen on English studies:
“The unprecedented levels of new funding will have a transformative effect on the centre’s research activities and postgraduate training.”
Oi, Tom, what’s wrong with:
“This is the largest award the AHRB has ever made. It will transform our research and graduate teaching.”
? He goes on to misapply a couple of adverbs, confuse the subject of a sentence, and abuse a relative pronoun so completely I’m not even sure that it’s functioning as one:
“Equally, however, the AHRB decision, taken only after thorough consultation with distinguished international assessors, demonstrates that the Humanities in the Scottish universities, like colleagues in science and medicine, can achieve world-class research status which brings great honour and prestige to our country.”
Spend some of your new dosh on a secretary, mate. (S)he’ll fix your prose before it escapes to injure innocent readers. I wouldn’t mind so much, but I have quoted the whole extent of Devine’s contribution to the university’s press release. How long did it take him to write these two horrible sentences? Sorry, three. I omitted this gem:
“This is stunning news not simply for Aberdeen and its partners but for Arts and Humanities in Scotland in general.”
PooterGeekers paying the professor’s salary can take some comfort that this post will be in the top ten Google hits for “Tom Devine” within a week. Will he find it? Will he be able to construct a comprehensible or grammatically correct reply in the comments? I can only bid him here with that timeless English battle-cry: “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!”
If you have Flash installed in your browser, this is a pleasing diversion. [via The Motley Fool]
The BBC has a round-up of “experts'” views on “Iran’s nuclear crisis”. Helpfully, after the introduction to the piece, each comment is abstracted to a single line. One of the wise men questioned by Auntie—Sanam Vakil, of the Council on Foreign Relations, Washington—offers this new insight into the affair:
“The Iranians need some really big carrots”
And I thought it was only on TV that the presence of nuclear power stations gave rise to giant mutant vegetables.
Under the headline “Asylum Falling Around The World”, The Beeb reports the United Nations reporting that:
“The number of asylum seekers coming to the industrialised world fell by a fifth in 2004 to its lowest level in 16 years, according to the United Nations.”
.
.
.“…the number of asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Iraq continued to fall – the two nations formerly having produced some of the largest movements of people into Europe in recent years.
“The number of Afghans seeking asylum has dropped by 83% since 2001 while Iraqi asylum applications have fallen by 80% since 2002. These falls have coincided with regime changes in both countries.
I hope that the impartial British Broadcasting Corporation isn’t trying to imply that regime change led to people wanting to remain in their own countries. More of that kind of talk and the British National Party will be changing its policy on military intervention overseas.
[I had trouble tracking down that little bit of text on the BNP’s Website. The link they themselves give points to a URL containing the phrase “policies/policies/policies”, but leading nowhere. They have more in common with the Tories than I thought.]
I wrote too soon. The verification system for comments is choking on even the most basic HTML. When I get a chance I’ll try to fix it. This is getting bone-crushingly dull.
There was a point at which even I couldn’t comment here, but, thanks to casualsavant’s perfect bug report—not just “it doesn’t work”, but details of the error message too, I think I have sorted out the problem she identified. Please, everyone else, email me if you are having any difficulties submitting your pearls to PooterGeek.
“TrekUnited” is an organisation that claims to be dedicated to stopping the cancellation of the TV series Star Trek: Enterprise. It is holding rallies in New York, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, and London. Need I say any more?
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